


Any Kind of Rain

by roseofgalaxies (callmelyss)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Hux Zine, Hux is still Hux, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-TRoS, War and Its Aftermath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:46:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29610318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmelyss/pseuds/roseofgalaxies
Summary: Arkanis. His homeworld, although it’s never felt as such. The Finalizer was, yes, to his pride. Starkiller Base for a time. The decrepit assortment of Imperial ships on which he was raised, to a degree. Indeed, if he ever possessed such a thing as a home, it was the Order itself, the fierce machine he engineered, not this drizzly little planet, scarcely recalled from his childhood and never fondly. One may as reasonably inquire if he misses his father.—After the war, Hux needs a place to lay low.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	Any Kind of Rain

Hux wakes to the sound of water.

He had been dozing, his head tipped back against the wall of the unmarked shuttle he’s called home these past weeks, arms folded over his chest—he snuffles alert all at once, reaching automatically for the blaster at his hip. But the ship is quiet. He blinks away his fogged thoughts, the murmurs of the long and new dead, and tries to shake off the distant tumbling of waves the same. Although he thinks he still hears these last, gnawing, brackish, on some nearby shore.

He has dreamed of the sea since Exegol. 

Twenty cycles now. Twenty cycles since he twitched awake, the peculiar sound of a tide in his ears, his skin still tacky with half-dried bacta, globs of it clinging to his eyelashes, his throat raw from the breathing tube, his mouth stale. Twenty cycles since he reached for the wound that no longer existed in the center of his chest, that radiant blooming agony where the plasma had struck him, where Pryde had shot him like a dog. Twenty cycles since he snapped at Opan, “I told you never to put me in the tank.” Although there wasn’t nearly enough bite to it, his voice hoarse, brittle, dry. 

Impassive as ever, Opan hadn’t even shrugged at the rebuke. As soon as Hux could walk, he bundled him into a lieutenant’s uniform and onto a shuttle away from the _Steadfast_ , all prepared in advance. There had always been contingencies.

Yes, twenty cycles have passed since the Order fell. The Final Order, as Pryde and the decaying Emperor called it. Hux saw little of the battle in their flight from that cursed planet, but it’s been well documented, the Resistance’s unlikely—implausible, _impossible_ —victory over the Emperor’s fleet of Sith Destroyers. By all accounts, Hux’s life’s work was ruined in a matter of hours by a pair of grandiose mystics; a hodgepodge of rebellion relics and motley guerrilla fighters; and the gross incompetence of his predecessors, Pryde and his lot, so assured of victory they practically self-immolated. 

It had been a trifling consolation to learn that the so-called Allegiant General was a confirmed casualty in the fight, the _Steadfast_ fallen near the end. Or of the widely mourned death of the rebels’ beloved princess. Or Kylo Ren’s subsequent disappearance. Indeed, it seems Hux has outlived, outlasted them all. Won, by his own terms. And yet.

“We’ve arrived, sir,” Opan informs him needlessly, stepping out of the cockpit. Water drums the ship’s hull. No doubt the mud is sucking at the landing gear, pulling them down into the morass around them. Waiting to do the same to him, Hux.

“Yes,” he agrees and stands, rolling his neck and raising the collar of his long coat—rough and civilian, just like the rest of their gear—around his ears. He can already feel the chill and damp outside. He’s not been here in years. He had ventured back once or twice as a young officer but found little more than moth-eaten aristocrats and ravenous sea monsters. The Imperial Academy was an abandoned ruin, all his father’s efforts effaced by time and wet and falling bombs. Dissipated. Not unlike Brendol himself in the end. Hux’s slight smile at the memory spasms into a grimace as the shuttle’s loading ramp shudders open, revealing the gray-green world outside, blurred with the falling rain. 

Arkanis. His homeworld, although it’s never felt as such. The _Finalizer_ was, yes, to his pride. Starkiller Base for a time. The decrepit assortment of Imperial ships on which he was raised, to a degree. Indeed, if he ever possessed such a thing as a _home_ , it was the Order itself, the fierce machine he engineered, not this drizzly little planet, scarcely recalled from his childhood and never fondly. One may as reasonably inquire if he misses his father.

It’s temporary, Hux reminds himself as he steps out onto the grass, mud squelching under his boots in perfect indignity. He only needs some obscure bolthole in which to wait while his agents do their work, scattered across the Galaxy. Opan can accomplish more on his own without a conspicuous ex-First Order General to attract attention, Hux’s face too often flung across the holonet for anonymity. And no one will look for him here. No one should be looking for him at all. The war was won, the New Republic restored, and Armitage Hux executed, a spy and a traitor to the Order. The Resistance has even named him with their dead, likely Dameron’s handiwork, a grinning tribute to his betrayal.

Truthfully, he’s little more than a ghost now.

It’s for the best. Not ideal but best, given the circumstances. He had hoped for more time to plan, but no matter. He will bide his time, as he has always done, and the pieces will fall into place. There is value in momentary retreat in service of the greater victory. And Hux has faith in his people—they are his, after all. Not Pryde’s. Not Ren’s. Not some moldering Emperor’s. His. They’ll come through.

“I’ll expect weekly reports,” he informs Opan by way of farewell. He has a datapad and everything else he needs in his pack. More than enough credits in his aliases’ accounts. This is no different than an extended campaign in the field. No more arduous than the months spent excavating Starkiller. Before long, he’ll be on his way to the Unknown Regions to greet the Order’s reunited forces. He has speeches to write, schematics to draw, calculations to make. His part to play, yes. 

Opan salutes crisply. “Sir.”

Hux watches the shuttle disappear into the clouds.

🌊

He can’t say why he tramps up the muddy hillside towards the remains of the Academy. The spaceport and what succor and shelter this world can offer are in the opposite direction. But the place draws him, always has. He recalls his disappointment on the first visit; some sentimental part of him had expected more of the damp patch of earth where he was born, some sign of his great destiny. But there were only the empty grounds, the vacant-eyed buildings to greet him. Not the slightest flicker of memory either. He had read once that one might coax early impressions to the surface with sensation, tying them to a long-lost taste or smell or sound and dragging them up from the depths.

Not that he thought. Or wanted.

No, his earliest recollections are still of Brendol, those other children with their scavenger eyes, and Sloane, impeccable, untouchable in her uniform. There’s nothing of the slick grass under his feet, the sharp saline perfume of the air, the patter of water on water. No voice other than his father’s. This place is as alien to him as any other half-glimpsed planet and no more welcoming. It’s a footnote in his personnel file, as inconsequential as his eye color. 

He wends his way through the buildings, most of them half-collapsed, lost to the bombardment and time and weeds now, creepers swarming thick over the stone. The rebels had been strategic in keeping to military targets during the siege; he studied the accounts closely as a cadet, curious in the way one is about childhood anecdotes. And afterward, the New Republic welcomed Arkanis back to the Senate with every other world, never mind where their allegiances lay. Foolish, as ever, and dangerous in their naïveté. Their castles built on shifting sands.

A loose nerf trumpets on the overgrown lawn and stampedes away at the sight of him. 

Hux approaches the cliff’s edge, conscious of his footing, looking down at the wine-dark sea below, the frothy striations of the waves. In the distance: the crumbling pillar of a tower, the sandbar leading out to its base washed away long ago. Near it, an inky limb thrashes free of the water, the long arm of a leviathan snatching prey from the air, some unlucky flier. 

The rain begins to fall more steadily, water running chilly down his collar, dripping from the brim of his cap. Hux doesn’t move, still staring out over the churning sea, hands clasped at the small of his back. Arkanis is a living world, at least, however raw. Exegol was a tomb. The Order buried there, too, now. Pryde. Ren.

Bright color catches in the corner of his vision, and he turns, reaching again for his blaster. But there’s no one there, only fog, grass, stone. A moment passes before he sees it: a jewel-winged insect perched on the shoulder of his coat, a moth or beetle of some kind, its wings glowing ultramarine. Taking shelter from the weather, apparently, in the shade of his collar. Hux flaps a hand at it. “Away with you,” he orders, and it flutters off into the wet. 

Beyond it stands a sentient.

He mistakes them for rubble at first; they’re so hunched and bundled that he can’t discern their species, let alone their age or gender. Hux blinks the water out of his eyes and realizes what he took for a hump was a large, woven basket strapped to their back. A long poncho obscures most of their body, but the eyes staring at him seem to be human, if unusually colorless in the dishwater light. Equally pale hair, what may be white or blonde, sneaks out from under a shapeless hat. They rest a hand on the hilt of a long knife, sheathed at their waist.

Hux raises both hands in a universal gesture of harmlessness, lets a small smile ease onto his lips, raises his eyebrows. “Forgive me, I’m a stranger here. I didn’t mean to trespass.” Hopefully, they speak Basic.

The newcomer’s stance relaxes somewhat, although their gaze doesn’t leave his face. Perhaps he’s the only person they’ve seen in days, weeks. Perhaps visitors are an anomaly here. Finally, they clear their throat. “It ain't mine,” they reply, hoarse, vowels gummy with the local dialect, and wave a hand at the Academy grounds. “But this beach is the best for digging clams.”

“I imagine it would be,” Hux says, agreeable, although the thought of scrabbling in the coarse sand for some slippery mollusks makes his nails itch.

They grunt an affirmative.

Hux looks back at them, neither speaking. He has no cause to say, “I’m bound for the spaceport. Would you know of anyone headed that way? Maybe a cart—or a speeder.” But it slips out anyway. He didn’t expect to find someone here and planned on walking, but it’s already growing dark. He’s lingered by the water for longer than he realized. Doesn’t relish the idea of tramping through the soggy night.

The clam digger shakes their head. “Not tonight. Could catch a transport on the main road in the mornin’, but they’ll all be headed the wrong way now.”

Hux holds back a growl of frustration, worrying his lower lip with an eyetooth. It isn’t like him to be careless with the time, although it’s different, of course, without a ship to oversee, without shifts and schedules, without the precise rotation of personnel and duties, as exacting as any chronometer. Order over a chaotic universe, as it should be, as he intended it to be. But that’s lost to him—for now. And so he has little choice but to camp in the mud tonight for his negligence. It would be no surprise to his father, this slip.

 _Useless_ , Brendol echoes.

 _You’re dead_ , Hux answers.

“I’ve a place,” the sentient offers, interrupting his calculations. Run-off and predators and rations. “Ain’t much, but. It’s out of the wind.” They pat their basket. “And there’ll be stew.”

He regards them, wary. Unlikely they have any notion of who he is. Even if so, he has the advantage of height, his blaster, surprise. It’s a risk, yes, but an acceptable one. “Yes, that’s—thank you.”

“Can’t let the Deep Ones get you. They love off-worlder, y’know. You’d be a rare delicacy to them.” A broad grin splits their face, startling him. 

Local humor. Charming. “Ah,” Hux says. “Right.”

“I’m Sadhbh.”

“Armitage.”

🌊

It’s a short, if occasionally skidding, walk down the hill; before long, the Academy disappears into the mist, thick as ghosts, as though it never was.

Sadhbh, he learns in short order, is indeed a human woman, squarely in middle age. Not much older, at a guess, than the now-vanquished rebel princess, General or Senator Organa, whatever she was calling herself by the end. Sadhbh, of course, has never left Arkanis, never led an army, never bothered the Galaxy one jot with her entitlement. “Was born a day’s walk from these cliffs,” she tells him, brusque when he asks. “Like as to die here, too.” 

She leads him without ceremony into a small cottage of thatch and stone. Drops the basket of shellfish with a rattle on the hearth. Sheds her wet outerwear, revealing a plain homespun dress and woolen leggings underneath. “Y’can hang your coat there,” she directs him, nodding at an empty hook. “And there’s house shoes.”

The house shoes are tatty, with faded embroidery and cowrie shells stitched across the toes. Nothing like his slippers on the _Finalizer_ , his furniture, his robe, the rooms he’d made his own, all gone since Batuu. No, the shoes are like this shanty, dark and threadbare and homely, the chinks in the walls sealed with mud. The solitary nods to progress are a squat solar-powered heat lamp in the corner and a vibroknife on the kitchen table. Sadhbh picks up the latter and reaches into her basket for a clam. With one swift, practiced motion, she slides the blade between the halves of the shell, twists, popping it open, and slices the soft creature inside free, dropping it into a bowl at her elbow. 

Hux watches her repeat this process three times, feeling mildly nauseated before she raises an eyebrow at him. “Too good to help an old woman cook, hm?”

He is a General of the First Order, commander of its many armies, the flag officer of his own resurgent-class star destroyer, he wants to say, and as such, _no,_ _he does not_ _shuck oysters_. But there are no stormtroopers hanging on his every word here, no smartly saluting lieutenants panting for his approval, not even Ren looming behind him, not even the wreckage of all his ambitions. Only this woman, her features roughened, prematurely creased by hard labor, brine, and wind. Only this little house, squat and sturdy against the falling rain. Only the rumbling tide. Only—

He peels off his gloves and stuffs them in his pocket. Sits, accepts a knife and a clam, its shell rough and gritty against his skin. It slips free on his first attempt to pry it open, shooting out between his fingers. 

Hux scowls and snatches it up again, making to stick in the knife, but loses his grip again, and the shell clatters onto the table. 

A third attempt sees it rocketing onto the floor.

Sadhbh lets out a throaty laugh.

He tosses the knife onto the table in a fit of pique. He’ll not be mocked, not be made to feel— “Bollocks,” he mutters.

“Now, now, Armitage,” she chides. The _r_ of his name rolls gently in her brogue. “There’s a trick to cherrystones. You hold them this way.” She presses another clam into Hux’s palm and adjusts his grip, not noticing his twitch at being touched so casually, or else not caring. Her hands are calloused, hard. “Feel that joint right there? That’s where you put the knife. Go on. Try again.” She watches him. “Good. And twist? Just with your blade hand, mind.” 

The shell pops open easily enough at her direction, and Hux scoops out the mollusk inside with a satisfaction previously reserved for designing Starkiller, assassinating his fathers’ cronies, and gunning down Resistance starfighters. He drops it into the bowl with its slimy peers; Sadhbh murmurs her approval, _There, not so bad, eh?_ She watches him work on another two before she returns to her own shucking, dismantling the shells with steady, rapid efficiency.

“It’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone up the hill,” she remarks after a lull.

Hux tries to keep himself relaxed. It’s idle conversation, nothing more. “Is that so?”

“We used to get all sorts, you know, even after the Concordance. Military types. Governors. Even a fellow in those brown robes one time, wanting to get out to the old tower.”

He suspects he could identify the Jedi in question, although he’d seen him just once through the viewport of the command shuttle on Crait. “That was a long time ago, I imagine,” he murmurs. He concentrates on his shucking, dispatching the clams and neatly stacking their shells with all his usual precision, even when he feels her attention on him.

She hums in agreement. “Better part of ten years since anyone bothered with that place. Sometimes the kids around here get into it, playing it’s haunted or some such. But it ain’t really a place for kids, y’know.”

“No,” Hux says. “It never was.” He reaches for another clam, but there’s none left, nothing but sand in the bottom of the basket. He curls his fingers into a fist instead, clenching his knuckles to white.

Sadhbh studies him, pauses, as though she might say something. Grabs his wrist again and squeezes. Then, as briskly as before, she takes the bowl and sets about the place, pulling herbs and foodstuffs—dehydrated vegetables, some sort of lumpy tubers—from cabinets, dumping the lot into a round-bodied pot over the hearth. It’s not long before the rich smells of cooking shellfish, saffron, and spring onion fill the room. 

Hux’s stomach rumbles loudly, despite the unfamiliar food. There’s the barest flicker: a warm kitchen, a wooden spoon, those smells—

“Here,” she says. She’s ladling water into the pot, stirring it slowly. “This needs to simmer awhile. Cut that bread for us, won’t you, Armitage?”

There’s something, too, about how she says his name.

He obeys; the loaf is fresh, perhaps baked that morning. He inhales, taking in the yeast and grain. Can’t resist breaking off a corner, relishing the nutty taste, eyes closing.

She doesn’t chastise him. “Not much homemade food where you come from, hm?” 

Hux looks up sharply, but there’s nothing suspicious in her tone. Teasing, yes. Maybe she’s mistaken him for a spoiled Core World tourist, not responsible for his own meals. Maybe. “No,” he acknowledges. Sometimes there was imported food, luxuries he allowed himself in the privacy of his chambers, but mainly he ate as his troops did, pre-packaged MREs, perfectly nutritionally balanced, if somewhat lacking in flavor, texture. “Never had much time for it.”

“My ma taught me how to cook,” Sadhbh explains. “It mattered to her that I knew.”

 _And did you teach your children_ , Hux doesn’t ask. He moves through the room, drawn by faded colors, blue and gold and green. A quilt pinned to the wall, stitched with symbols he does and doesn’t recognize: seashells and spirals and what may be a red sun. He traces the arc of a cresting wave with one fingertip. A family heirloom, no doubt, passed down through the generations. On a low shelf: carvings and clay figures, the sort one might give to an infant to calm him. They’re small, fragile in his hand. A patchwork tooka lolls nearby, one ear-worn to velvet by constant touch. He strokes the fabric, frowning.

A warm kitchen. A wooden spoon clutched in his fist. A voice humming. Waves. It’s like a holo of someone else: a boy, small for his age, at her side, dragging the toy. 

His nails bite his palms. His breath wheezes high in his lungs. _Did you teach them?_ he can’t ask. _Did you teach him, too?_

Sadhbh is watching him carefully when he looks up from the trinkets. Wisps of loose hair halo her face; it’s strawberry blonde going to silver, he sees now, in the hearth’s glow. Her eyes are gray, or near-gray. Green. Sharp features softened by age. Something wary in her face, perhaps mirroring his. “Armitage,” she says. “Always thought that a lonely name.”

🌊

They sit at the table by the hearth to eat, the nearby heat welcome as the night encroaches, the room shadowed save for the lamp and the fire. “Hydroelectrics,” Hux says suddenly to the gloom, as though answering a posed question, although neither of them has spoken since the meal began.

“What’s that now?”

He gestures with a bit of bread. “You would still need a power cell, of course, but you could easily run a generator on water out here. The kinetic energy of the waves. Or wind.” It’s good bread; he sops up more of the broth with it, eating while he talks. “It would be more efficient than solar energy, given the cloud cover.”

“More efficient. Is that so?” Sadhbh snorts. “And where am I to get a generator?”

Hux shrugs. “They’re easy enough to build from spare parts.” He’d managed it by the time he was seven: it had been a tiny, hand-cranked affair, just strong enough to power a nightlight. Far less complicated than a ship or a weapon. He could sketch a design. A kind of payment. No need to be beholden to anyone. Even her, inconsequential as she is. Especially her.

She’s still regarding him with amusement. “So you’re a mechanic, is it? You build things?”

He takes another bite of clam, savoring it before answering: “Sometimes. Yes, I design, ah. Machines. Or I did. Before.”

“Before the war, hm?” Sadhbh nods knowingly. Pats his arm again. “That business with the First Order, all those worlds lost. And here we are again, the same as always. Nothing new in the Galaxy.”

Hux’s grip tightens on his bowl. Salt grits between his molars. _It was meant to be different, it would have been, if I could have, I should have been, it was mine, and they ruined it, ruined everything, and I—_ “It could have been better,” he manages. “With the right leader. The right vision.”

She laughs, shaking her head. “You’re young yet. You probably can’t remember the last war, but believe me, it was just the same. Two sides set on tearing each other to bits with all the little people caught in the middle. That’s how it goes every time, no matter what symbols they wear, what banners they fly. And the rest of us scrambling to keep living.” 

“This was an Imperial stronghold,” he protests, his father’s voice in his ear again, telling those old stories of glory. “A Centrist planet. Loyal to the Empire.”

“Ah, but what does that mean to fish?” Sadhbh asks. “Emperors. Jedi. Great ships. It don’t change much for the rest of us, just who comes around waving their blasters, telling everyone to bow down.”

He stares at her, feeling his face flush. “People _suffered_ under the New Republic. The Senate left whole systems to rot. They were negligent, complacent. They didn’t _care_.” It never would have happened like that under the Order, his Order. He would have fixed it _._ “They deserved to be destroyed.”

She huffs, no longer laughing, her voice suddenly sharper, louder: “You think the Empire cared about this planet? Or any planet? The people here? Or any of the children up that damn hill? They left us to get bombed and invaded, all those brave officers were gone at the first sign of trouble. Bloody cowards, the lot of them—they took our babes and _ran_.” She stops, catching herself at the end of this speech. Takes her bowl and his to dump in the kitchen sink, the tin clattering. Says, softer, her back to him: “No one ever cared about us, Armitage. No one ever will.”

Hux listens to her washing the plates, agitated scrubbing. He studies the walls, their handmade decorations, yellow stars or starfish painted on plaster. The quilt, the raggedy tooka. The smell of bread, of home-cooked food. It doesn’t matter, of course, what one odd, reclusive fishwife thinks about his aims. It wouldn’t have mattered, had he won, what she or anyone thought. They would see. He would make them see. He still can. He simply needs time; yes, soon enough, he’ll be back on the bridge of his flagship, surveying his fleet, addressing his assembled troops, the Galaxy his for the taking again.

“There will be parts for trade at the spaceport,” he says finally. “I could come back and build that generator.” It’s not kindness, of course. He has never had reason to be kind. It’s bartering. He has to make his way here. For now.

“That’s a fine thought,” Sadhbh says, her voice rough, a rawness around her eyes. “There’s plenty needs doing around here, y’know. I can promise hot food, a roof over your head, so long as you need them.” She pauses, shakes her head. “It ain’t much.”

He only needs somewhere quiet. “Maybe,” Hux says. No, it’s not kindness, not gentleness. He has no use for either; he never has. All the same, there’s this: “You could teach me how to cook.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
